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A Reply to Josef Průša

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Re: A Reply to Josef Průša

#71

Post by Fomite »

sixothree wrote: post #61
captainmuon wrote: post #17

If you want to share designs, but you want reciprocity and you want to retain some control, then I wouldn't bother with "licenses" as we have them in the software world - as in "I drop this here, stick a license on it, and someone can grab it and use it under these terms, without ever talking to me". Rather, offer people the option to sign a little contract in order to use it. Keep the barrier as low as possible, an…

He may not get reciprocity but his platform absolutely benefits from it being open source. The number of mods this has enabled makes his printer better. It’s that simple in my mind.

He also gets goodwill from it. The number of people, including fairly significant figures in the 3D printing world, will knock some of his logical competitors (Bambu) for not being open source.

Each Prusa printer has some of its price premium attributable to "We like Joseph Prusa", and a lot (but not all) of that comes down to being open source.

Re: A Reply to Josef Průša

#72

Post by glompers »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #57
londons_explore wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The clones in many ways are better engineering . Any engineer can build a bridge. Only a good engineer can build a bridge that meets all the user requirements, while not massively overengineering the structure (and hence the budget). They typically cut just the right corners to make a still functional product at a vastly reduced price. And for that, the clone-makers are, IMO, contributing to the ecosystem. The origin…

I'm not aware of a single clone of the prusa designs that have been as good as prusa's. Prusa's machines are expensive but by and large "just work", and keep on working, and have a strong reputation for this, backed by them eating their own dogfood, producing printers with their printers. The clones are almost always require a lot of tweaking/fixes/upgrades and aren't durable or reliable. Some of them are downright d…

Good perspective for businesspeople who tend to create a false equivalence between being a successful fast follower in the market and being a successful innovator, as though the market oxygen which fast followers seek were simply something that would still be 'in the room' without innovators' R&D and commercialization first putting it there.

Re: A Reply to Josef Průša

#73

Post by quailfarmer »

Nitpick, but:

> Arduino literally opened their platform to competitors and flourished.

Arduino as a hardware manufacturer has collapsed in relevance in the last 5 years, in part because they were continually undercut by clones and similar/compatible hardware. In their case, it seems intentional, Arduino IDEs openly allow other manufacturers to add support for new boards. I think this was always the ethos of the Arduino project, so it’s hard to make a comparison to Prusa

Re: A Reply to Josef Průša

#74

Post by AbraKdabra »

> Completely open sources hardware

> People clone the hardware 1:1 with minimal changes

> Gets angry by it

wat

I mean, I get the frustration but why the fuck did you actually open sourced it in the first time, this is a hard surprised pikachu meme.

Re: A Reply to Josef Průša

#75

Post by chpatrick »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #60
Moto7451 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard agree. This sounds more like Josef and perhaps the author have a romantic idea about open source but now dislike the realities. There’s no way you can get people to pinky swear to not use the rights in the license you chose. There are so many cases of millions or billions of dollars being generated through companies built on open source software. To not expect the same of hardware is unrealistic. I’m not an expe…

[flagged]

Making 3D printers available to people with less money is quite a contribution if you ask me.

Re: A Reply to Josef Průša

#76

Post by AbraKdabra »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #60
Moto7451 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard agree. This sounds more like Josef and perhaps the author have a romantic idea about open source but now dislike the realities. There’s no way you can get people to pinky swear to not use the rights in the license you chose. There are so many cases of millions or billions of dollars being generated through companies built on open source software. To not expect the same of hardware is unrealistic. I’m not an expe…

[flagged]

We all can agree that we get his frustration and we join him in sentiment, I mean, I own an Ender printer, I'd love to buy a Prusa but where I live they cost 3 times more, and THAT'S the true spirit of open source, it's working "as intended", he should be grateful (not the greatest word but I can't think of another one, you get what I want to say) that people are cloning his work, if it wasn't for the clones I wouldn't be in the world of 3D printing and hopefully one day I'll be able to own a Prusa.

Re: A Reply to Josef Průša

#77

Post by GravitasFailure »

pen2l wrote: post #29
jeffybefffy519 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have often considered buying a Prusa, and it was because their printers are good quality and low fuss, the community has literally never been a driving force. Perhaps you could replace community with ecosystem in that sentence.

By the way when did Prusa become known for their printers? I was around when Ultimaker 2 was considered the best in a "Just Works" kind of way and Lulzbot was the choice for the more tinkerer/hacker-aligned user. I stepped away from FDM printers and onto Formlabs' STL printers around when U2 ruled (not exactly a move to greener pastures, they're closed-source all the way), seems like a lot has changed since I left as…

I think around 2016 with the end of the Mk2/start of the Mk3 is when they really came into their own. Ultimaker, from my understanding, was always a business/institutional aligned company and only popular in the more well-heeled hobbyist circles, and while Lulzbot was popular they didn't offer much that Prusa didn't and had to compete on price, which meant they suffered the same fate as every other American manufacturer: Lose to Eastern Europe and Asia.

Re: A Reply to Josef Průša

#78

Post by tailrecursion »

It used to be said that piracy actually helped the copyright holder, by exposing more people to the work who sometimes might buy a copy.

It's also curious for an open source advocate to complain about knock-off brands such as Ender and Behringer, when open source is lousy with projects that are knock offs -- sorry "open source versions" -- of commercial products.

Re: A Reply to Josef Průša

#79

Post by sircastor »

krisoft wrote: post #33

> This includes activities that are intentionally exploitative such producing 1:1 clones of open hardware with minimal changes I’m astonished by this opinion. They released their designs under a permissive licence. Should people be mind readers and figure out that they actually meant that you should not make 1:1 clones? Would you call it “intentionally exploitative” if I build the linux kernel on my computer? They wi…

> I’m astonished by this opinion. They released their designs under a permissive licence. Should people be mind readers and figure out that they actually meant that you should not make 1:1 clones?

Anyone who's been in the 3D Printing community for a while understands the expectation. It used to be that designs and concepts were shared and expanded on. Hotend and nozzle designs were shared. Techniques for assembling hotends. The first Prusa printers (before it was a company) were literally the RepRap standard design for a long time. We would do group orders for RAMPS boards. Someone would have a local machine shop make 50 nozzles. People parlayed that into ebay stores and a few businesses popped up. Businesses where the seller of the board was also the designer.

To folks who were part of that, someone who just takes the design and sells it for a thin margin seems disingenuous. They're not introducing meaningful changes. This person (or people) did this work, and tried to contribute it to the community, and they show up to make a quick buck off their work.

We expect everyone to act in good faith, but were limited by the licenses we had to lean on at the time. Clearly though, complying with a license is not a reasonable measure of whether someone is doing something good or bad.

Re: A Reply to Josef Průša

#80

Post by schneems »

krisoft wrote: post #33

> This includes activities that are intentionally exploitative such producing 1:1 clones of open hardware with minimal changes I’m astonished by this opinion. They released their designs under a permissive licence. Should people be mind readers and figure out that they actually meant that you should not make 1:1 clones? Would you call it “intentionally exploitative” if I build the linux kernel on my computer? They wi…

> Should people be mind readers and figure out that they actually meant that you should not make 1:1 clones

That’s the core problem of the “licenses are the alpha and omega of open source” crowd.

I released my book How To Open Source (dot dev) with a license that doesn’t make it illegal to share with a struggling friend or an educator. It is CC (NC/SA) because there isn’t a license that perfectly describes my wishes and that was the best one. On the day of my announcement someone on /r/opensource took great glee in this loophole as they saw it. And proclaimed they would repost the whole thing in the announcement thread.

Laurence Lessig, creator of the CC license, inherently saw communities as more than licenses. In his book Code he identifies Laws, norms, markets, and technology as influencing community behavior.

While I agree you shouldn’t be a mind reader, we also cannot expect communities to be based on licenses and laws alone.

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